Ive used gentoo for a year now, and I absolutely love it.
A few weeks ago, the laptop that gentoo had been installed on was brutally suffocated by the blankets that my cat pulled onto it.

As a result, a new laptop was ordered.

While that was going on, Ive been doing a lot of thinking. Im just a poor university student who wants to learn more about linux so that I can help others more redily and to improve software (Im known as sandy(d) on the Ubuntu Forums). Neverless, though gentoo has taught me millions of things, and allowed me to have the latest bleeding edge software, I find myself wasting a lot of time compiling programs. In university, that time could be spent doing something more useful (since im a cs student)

Its not really gentoo's fault as much as it is mine. My laptop is extremely noisy when it turns on the fan, so I can't compile overnight. During the day, compiling stuff slows down my laptop significantly (I just have a meagre 2d-gen i5-2430M.).

Ive been thinking of installing it on my desktop as well, but it only has a even worse Pentium 4HT. Meanwhile, I replaced the motherboard on the overheated laptop. It only had a ATI Radeon 3650 HD Mobility, which lags horribly in KDE with both propriety and OSS drivers. Its one of the reasons why that laptop dual-boots.

As a result, I (sadly) won't be using gentoo anymore, not until I pick up a more powerful desktop. Ive already posted an offer on the bulletin boards in the dorms, and hopefully someone will take me up on my offer.

My first gentoo install was on 700mhz athlon _________________"Dear Enemy: may the Lord hate you and all your kind, may you be turned orange in hue, and may your head fall off at an awkward moment."
"Linux is like a wigwam - no windows, no gates, apache inside..."

mine was on amd-k6, 350 MHz. Went all the way stage1 with it. Good times.

Yea, Gentoo really shines on old hardware _________________"Dear Enemy: may the Lord hate you and all your kind, may you be turned orange in hue, and may your head fall off at an awkward moment."
"Linux is like a wigwam - no windows, no gates, apache inside..."

My laptop is a intel core duo 2 1.8ghz compiles and runs most DE's without issue

++ here, and that Core2 Duo LV laptop of mine will surely last another 2 years unless Intel can come up with something comparable in battery times. _________________backend.cpp:92:2: warning: #warning TODO - this error message is about as useful as a cooling unit in the arctic

gentoo actually can really shine on old hardware, you know having only what you need running only the bare min configured in your programs. a smaller leaner system, rather than some other distro that uses up 2.5 gigs of ram by the time the desktop loads._________________A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

During the day, compiling stuff slows down my laptop significantly (I just have a meagre 2d-gen i5-2430M.).

Looks quite a powerful laptop to me! I have had gentoo in all my laptops. Nevertheless, at the beginning, when I was an exited gentoo-user, I used to have my system up-to-date and glance at the screen while it was compiling programmes. Nowadays, I just update my system twice a year, when I am on holidays.

Hope we have you back soon!

Cheers!_________________Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved.
Thank the community answering other people's post, specially those unanswered.

I keep runnin' Gentoo on my mother's Pentium III 866MHz, no problems at all.
What are you compiling that you need to do this overnight? libreoffice?
And about that slowness during daytime - have you ever set PORTAGE_NICENESS in make.conf and CONFIG_SCHED_AUTOGROUP in kernel?

Also maybe it is time to switch to a lighter DE/WM?_________________BTW, TWM FTW!

I have a 233MHz Geode (SBC on a ATX dev board) as well, that thing is _miserable_. I couldn't imagine building anything on it... Even my 500MHz Celeron I balk at...

Sry, no joke.

Using it to test compilers(/-flags), seing how slow machines react in certain cases, trying to find optimizations I could also use on beefier machines, etc. While not being a godsend, I even used it ~3 years ago as a desktop while my main machine was unavailable, ran pretty well with fluxbox and Opera back then._________________++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

At least mine, it actually uses SMM to emulate a lot of hardware. Therefore a slow machine is made even slower by emulation...

Currently I run a perl IRC bot on the Geode. It takes four seconds for the thing to parse through the scripts! (mixture of perl libraries plus a 51KB script). On my bigger machines this is pretty much instantaneous to parse through perl scripts...!_________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed to be advocating?

Dunno, I don't find it too bad personally, I just let it sit there and do it's stuff, getting notified when it's done. Got (enormous ) 192mb RAM in there and it's running of a pretty fast CF, though that doesn't help much in terms of compile time. Except for kernel, glibc and gcc, pretty much anything I use on this machine takes <=1h to build, acceptable for me.

If one doesn't use the heaviest of apps and tries to stay away from multitaskin, it's actually a pretty decent system to get (office) work done. When I think back, about 7-8 years ago, I tried compiling kde on my desktop - an AMD 2200+ (@1.4GHz IIRC), that was just plain ugly.

In fact, my good old N900 sometimes feels slower than the Geode, which annoys the heck out of me, but I've got yet to find a decent new phone _________________++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

Hey! I was also looking for a gentoo-like experience on older machines. I found Sabayon a very, very neat solution It has almost the same programs as Gentoo, additionally portage can be used if necessary. The configuration files are the same as Gentoo. Very well, it matured a lot since the last time I tried it._________________"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
Albert Einstein
"The road to success is always under construction"

Without the full specs of your computer (laptop and desktop) its pretty to determine whats the source of your slow pc problem. The only info I got is your cpu is a i5... to my knowledge, this laptop is not that old. I don't know anything else about that laptop but the laptop could have enough juice to run it.

The only thing I could tell you so we can help you is make sure your Gentoo system is optimized for your PC. to my knowledge even a Pentium 4 should run Gentoo very fast. (running xfce is 1 example that can make gentoo very fast ) but theres lots more of course_________________I'm a noob, be gentle with me. TEACH ME

Hey! I was also looking for a gentoo-like experience on older machines.

I'm using only old, second (or more) hands machine I got for free, and using Distcc/Binhost for installation. The binhost is the most powerful machine I got, a CeleronD 2.6 Mhz : a P4 1.4 Ghz, a P4 2.6 Mhz but with only 256 MB, and my Athlon 1.1 Ghz are part of Distcc network.

What can I said, is even on the Athlon 1.1 machin, Gentoo is preety usable even for compilation (as soon as CPU flags are changing, recompilation is needed). In fact, this Athlon is still my main computer (because it has some connectivities missing on more powerful boxes) and is ok for almost everything but YouTube video ... Flash player is not very optimized

I tried also on a Duron 750 Mhz and K7 650 Mhz :

- I gave up on the Duron because this machine is REALLY to noisy and very slow
- thanks to additionnal caches, the K7 is more useful.

But my (far) objective is to install something on stock 486 or P1 - 120 Mhz (got a brunch of old laptop I would like to re-use for domotic purposes). I did some tries but X with < 64 Mhz seems not realistic I'm still investigating on the same ...